Alien Vacation: Senior Project

Alien Vacation is my Senior Project, an animated short about two aliens trying to find the perfect vacation spot. My role on the team was Character and Environment Modeler, as well as our Lead Texture Artist and Lead Animator.

I am responsible for all Skipper animations in the interior of the spaceship, as well as the Skipper and Blorp animations in Philadelphia once Skipper steps on the gum!

Interior Environment

Above is the 3D interior of our aliens’ spaceship! This is both the Control and Throne Room for the Alien Emperor. The idea of the design was to have Emperor Blorp seated in a central position that gives him a great vantage point of Skipper’s console and his wall of souvenirs to the right.
I am responsible for modeling the spaceship interior and all of the souvenirs / props, as well as all texturing. Modeling was done in Maya, texturing in Substance Painter.

Character Models – Skipper

Meet Skipper, our main protagonist! The anxious assistant of Emperor Blorp, Skipper is tasked with finding his boss the perfect vacation spot. Is he up to the task?

Skipper was designed to be warm-toned, small, and jumpy. His antenna and three eyes help up emphasize his facial expressions. His warm colors are meant to separate him from the cool blues, and greens of the spaceship. 

Character Models – Emperor Blorp

Meet the Emperor of the Aliens: Blorp! This strict, hard-to-please Emperor is searching for a vacation spot that won’t bore him to death for once. He’s been to dozens of planets and seems to have seen everything this universe has to offer Or so he thinks.

Blorp was the most technically challenging aspect of this project. Blorp is a jello / slime sim (created in Unreal) and also has very small, stubby arms. One of our goals was to have his eye and arms slide anywhere on his body. I worked with Maya’s Shrink Wrap deformer to help achieve this, with both objects separated from the body itself and clinging to the mesh. When bringing Blrop into Unreal, his sliding eye socket created a harsh seam between it and his pulsing body, which was solved by fading the material into transparency around its edges. This posed a new problem, as his eyeball was now seen through the socket mesh. 

Blorp ended up consisting of 5 distinct and separate parts, all with different materials. His body, his arms, his eyeball, his outer eye socket, and his inner eye socket, which provided a barrier for the transparency of the outer eye. 

Check out my teammates on this project!

Claire Gutherman – Concept Artist, Storyboard Artist, Lighting Artist, Animator, Jello Sim Dev

Maggie Hall – Rigger, Motion Graphics, VFX, Compositing